Blogs & Videos: Climate Change

Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania has captured the imagination for decades, and climbing it is one of the most common items on the proverbial bucket list. “Kili” is not only the tallest mountain in Africa, it is the tallest free-standing (isolated and not part of a mountain range) massif in the world. Thousands of climbers ascend Kilimanjaro every year, trekking through multiple habitat zones to reach the summit which is 5895 m (19571 feet) above sea level. Read more about Kilimanjaro's Small Mammals

Team Brain Scoop is about to helicopter into a biologically unknown region of the Peruvian jungle with a team of conservationists to study and document the area's biodiversity for the first time in its history. Read more about Into Perú

A growing number of species in the modern world (nearly 200 in fact!) go extinct every day due to factors such as climate change and habitat destruction. During the earth's history, there also have been a number of mass extinctions, like the one that killed off the dinosaurs. Increasingly, scientists are turning to past mass extinctions to gain new insight into what is happening today. Read more about How to Recover from a Mass Extinction

Several weeks ago, a colleague (and former graduate school roommate), Kevin Burns, asked me about a pdf of a paper I wrote back in 1992. Here is the citation:
Bates, J. M., T. A. Parker, III, A. P. Capparella and T. J. Davis. 1992. Observations on the campo, cerrado, and forest avifaunas of eastern Dpto. Santa Cruz, Bolivia, including 21 species new to the country. Bull. Brit. Orn. Club 112:86-98. Read more about Remembering Ted Parker

Nina Cummings, who ably heads our photo archives in the museum shared with me an interesting blog post she saw recently. It was from The Library of Congress and was written by Bill LeFurgy, their digital initiatives manager of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. The title of the blog post was “What do researchers want from institutions that preserve digital content?” Here at the museum we are working through our digital initiatives so the post resonated on several fronts. The opening statement included this: “User expectations influence so much of what stewardship organizations do. We collect and preserve all content primarily to support use.” Read more about What do researchers want?